In her fine book, “Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy”, the historian Barbara Ehrenreich notes that “suffering remains the almost exclusive preoccupation of professional psychology. Journals in the field have published forty-five thousand articles in the last thirty years on depression, but only four hundred on joy”.
As it is with psychology, so it is with food and eating, in forkfuls. The quickest online search will throw up two and a quarter million stories about food and health scares, but we don’t need to go online to know that: we need only listen to the news or open a newspaper.
We endure a daily bombardment of information from the health, safety and scientific lobbies that collectively paint the simple acts of cooking, eating and drinking as fraught adventures, latent with every imaginable threat, potent with risk. “What doesn’t make you fat will kill you in the end” often seems the only way to summarise this era’s collective hysteria over food scares, food fads and food follies. From the fat content of your breakfast roll all the way to the sulfites in your Cabernet Sauvignon, the only tenable aphorism for our modern food culture seems to be: caveat emptor – buyer beware.
Sensible people, of course, steer clear of the forty-five thousand articles, or the two and a quarter million stories, that tell us what not to do, and head straight for the four hundred sources that tell us where and how to find culinary joy. But the onslaught of bad food news creates a problem, in particular, for our children.
“What shall we tell the children”? is the first issue, especially when your teenage Conor and Sarah announce that they aren’t eating any more chicken-tofu-beef-carrots-sausages-salad leaves-eggs on account of the latest news about GMOs-avian flu-pesticide residue levels-FMD or whatever it may be that has risen to the surface of contemporary concerns, and which has sparked into protest their natural fretfulness. You can try to be rational and reasonable and balanced and well-informed, but convincing that stubborn teenage mind that the sausages are safe and eggs are salmonella-free is no easy task. Children get informed by the media first, and by their parents second.
But a bigger issue for our children is, surely, the steady erosion of the concept of joy that should, rightfully, be derived from cooking and eating.
Fifteen years ago, the great chef-intellectual of the Irish kitchen, Gerry Galvin, wrote that “Children should be nurtured to inventive eating from an early age. We should teach them to eat as we teach them to read or play music. It requires patience, perseverance and love”.
Today, it would appear we nurture them to worry about food from an early age. Where do we hear the voices telling children that understanding and enjoying food, and being able to cook with it in an inventive way, is one of the primary creative functions of any human being? Books are on the curriculum big time, and playing music is the bee’s knees for any child, but who informs them that cooking is the best and most immediate means of self-expression open to any individual, and that preparing and sharing food is the cornerstone of any concept of community?
Food educates us in every skill and discipline – trade, economics, sensory appreciation, the visual arts, judgement, and it is freighted with mathematical and scientific enquiry: if you are prone to say that “Cooking isn’t rocket science”, then can I suggest you go and make a cheese soufflé, and have your mind changed in the process. Cooking is both art, and science, but the problem is simply that we teach the science, but not the art.
The onslaught of scares, and the yawning lack of common sense, has meant a devaluation of the culture of food, creating a widespread sense of suspicion amongst young people, and suspicion is the enemy of joy and pleasure. For a previous generation, the problems that were taking us to hell in a handcart were The Bomb, and Sex. Substitute Global Warming and Food, and you have today’s scary monsters.
If common sense was more common, then our children would see the stream of food scares as the disconnected junk science so much of it is. We need to teach our kids to eat, as Gerry Galvin said, and in teaching them to give them the confidence to edit and understand the scares, and consequently to enjoy the creativity of cooking, and the joy of the table.
04 October 2007
24 September 2007
Your recommendations
David McKittrick's comment, which I am going to post below, came through the contact section of the website. We're always interested in getting feedback on the places you visit. If you had a good - or, God forbid - bad experience when using the Bridgestone Guides, use this spot to let us know.
13 September 2007
Farmers' Markets
We are just updating our website to include details of all the farmers markets around the country. If you know of a good market, or sadly, if you hear of one closing - then share the info here.
31 August 2007
Questions for the Bridgestone Guides
Can't find a place that someone somewhere recommended? Lost touch with a place you used to visit? If you have any questions about the good people in Irish food then ask the Bridgestone Guides. And, if we can't help you one of our readers/bloggers might be able to.
07 August 2007
Farmers' Markets
"Americans don't eat food. They eat food products".
The brilliant American writer Michael Pollan made that statement,
during the course of a lecture at the Slow Food Terra Madre congress,
in Turin last October.
Even as I scribbled it in my notebook, it gave me a shiver. Here we
all were, tens of thousands of us, at the bi-annual Slow Food bash
which is a celebration of global food bio-diversity, and Mr Pollan
was telling us that, because the United States' food economy is
utterly dependent on corn - and on only 6 cultivars of corn -
something simple happens when you allow a single food to dominate a
food culture: "Corn is making us sick".
I was already familiar with this argument from Pollan's classic book,
"The Omnivore's Dilemma", in my opinion the most important book
written on the politics and business of food in the last decade, but
hearing it expressed so brutally - "Corn is making us sick" - still
came as a shock.
So, I did what every food lover does when confronted with something
shocking: I went to the food market at the Congress, and bought some
northern Indian basmati rice, some Italian bottarga, and some eye-
wipingly strong hootch from a nice man from Peru. Then I had some
fine Irish raw-milk farmhouse cheese, and a glass of English ale. I
felt a whole lot better.
Food and health are not just bedfellows. They are one and the same
thing. Michael Pollan's stark assertion of what happens to the health
element when you get the food element wrong is not just shocking, it
is also blindingly obvious.
I got my own taste of the food-health synthesis way back in the early
1990's, shopping at the Dublin Food Co-Op on Pearse Street. Chatting
to shoppers and stallholders, you quickly realized that some of the
shoppers were there looking for real foods to cure themselves, or a
relative, following illness.
They wanted those freshly dug organic carrots. They wanted
wholefoods. They wanted sourdough breads, and artisan cheeses made
with raw milk. By getting up early on a Saturday morning to get the
best produce, they were saying, simply "We want real food". They
wanted the curative power of good food.
Back in those days, the Food Co-op was one of the very few
alternatives to the blandness of food retailing that has become so
evident in the last ten years. But today it has been joined, with a
rush, by dozens of farmers' markets throughout the country.
Now, anyone interested in food, or economics, should warmly welcome
markets. They are a dynamic force in any economy, because they are a
meshwork of producers and people working together, quickly able to
fulfill the needs of their customers.
At their best, FMs are a one-stop solution shop to many of our food
ills. They have local foods that have travelled very few miles. They
sustain bio-diversity. They retain food spending power within an
area. They are environmentally sustainable. They are mighty fun. This
combination of reasons explains why 10,000 people will turn up at the
People's Park in Dun Laoghaire on a fine Sunday for their local CoCo
market.
Yet, for some reason, FMs draw the ire of very many people, who
denounce both the FMs, and more especially the customers who use
them, as mere baubles for the bourgeoisie. As someone who has written
about FMs from the beginning - I wrote the first articles on major
markets such as Temple Bar and Midleton on the Weekend pages of this
very newspaper - and who uses markets on a weekly basis, I think the
critics are missing the plot.
People don't use markets because they are an opportunity to show off
their spending power. They use them, I would suggest, for health just
as much as pleasure, and they don't differentiate between these two
objectives.
Farmer's markets are not playgrounds for dilettantes. They are part
of a food counter-culture.
This counter culture has its author heroes, such as Michael Pollan,
Joanna Blythman, Felicity Lawrence or Peter Singer, the philosopher
who has defined the debate on animal rights.
When the writer Jonathan Harvey tells us, in his book "We Want Real
Food", that Western European countries are "fifty years into a mass
experiment in human nutrition. We're all eating basic foods that have
been stripped of the antioxidants, trace elements and minerals and
essential fatty acids that once promoted good health", then we
believe Mr Harvey. And we respond in a simple way: we go to the
market, to get organic foods, local foods, artisan foods, the foods
that we believe will maintain, if not improve, our health.
We don't believe the nutritionists who tell us everything is fine. We
don't trust mass-produced foods, the battery chicken-Corn Flakes-Coca-
Cola culture that assails us, and our children, every day of the
week. BSE and bird flu don't surprise us one bit when they happen,
because we know the commercialized food culture is always working on
the edge of disaster.
And we have our food heroes, the individuals whose produce we snap up
at whatever markets we attend. Dan Ahern for chickens. Jens Krumpe
for dry-aged beef. Fingal Ferguson for pork. Stephane Griesbach for
fish. Sheridan's for cheeses. Jane Russell for sausages. Willie
Scannell for spuds. David Llewellyn for apple juice. Gary Crocker for
eggs. The list could go on and on, and goes on for page after page of
the new Bridgestone Irish Food Guide, which has grown to 536 pages,
largely thank to the growth in markets and producers.
Whilst personal health is a paramount element, it is only one reason
why those 10,000 people are at the People's Park on a Sunday.
Environmental health and agricultural sustainability are other
reasons why we use markets: we want a fit, clean planet for our
children. Far from being dilettantes, shoppers at FMs are highly
conscientious.
They can see the big picture wherein a healthy planet with a healthy
agriculture sustains healthy people. When we read the findings of the
geologist and nutritionist David Thomas, quoted in Jonathan Harvey's
book, that "you'd have needed to eat ten tomatoes in 1991 to get the
amount of copper a single tomato would have supplied in 1940", then
we know that allowing intensive, chemicalised, monoculture
agriculture to dictate what we eat will not sustain us.
The brilliant American writer Michael Pollan made that statement,
during the course of a lecture at the Slow Food Terra Madre congress,
in Turin last October.
Even as I scribbled it in my notebook, it gave me a shiver. Here we
all were, tens of thousands of us, at the bi-annual Slow Food bash
which is a celebration of global food bio-diversity, and Mr Pollan
was telling us that, because the United States' food economy is
utterly dependent on corn - and on only 6 cultivars of corn -
something simple happens when you allow a single food to dominate a
food culture: "Corn is making us sick".
I was already familiar with this argument from Pollan's classic book,
"The Omnivore's Dilemma", in my opinion the most important book
written on the politics and business of food in the last decade, but
hearing it expressed so brutally - "Corn is making us sick" - still
came as a shock.
So, I did what every food lover does when confronted with something
shocking: I went to the food market at the Congress, and bought some
northern Indian basmati rice, some Italian bottarga, and some eye-
wipingly strong hootch from a nice man from Peru. Then I had some
fine Irish raw-milk farmhouse cheese, and a glass of English ale. I
felt a whole lot better.
Food and health are not just bedfellows. They are one and the same
thing. Michael Pollan's stark assertion of what happens to the health
element when you get the food element wrong is not just shocking, it
is also blindingly obvious.
I got my own taste of the food-health synthesis way back in the early
1990's, shopping at the Dublin Food Co-Op on Pearse Street. Chatting
to shoppers and stallholders, you quickly realized that some of the
shoppers were there looking for real foods to cure themselves, or a
relative, following illness.
They wanted those freshly dug organic carrots. They wanted
wholefoods. They wanted sourdough breads, and artisan cheeses made
with raw milk. By getting up early on a Saturday morning to get the
best produce, they were saying, simply "We want real food". They
wanted the curative power of good food.
Back in those days, the Food Co-op was one of the very few
alternatives to the blandness of food retailing that has become so
evident in the last ten years. But today it has been joined, with a
rush, by dozens of farmers' markets throughout the country.
Now, anyone interested in food, or economics, should warmly welcome
markets. They are a dynamic force in any economy, because they are a
meshwork of producers and people working together, quickly able to
fulfill the needs of their customers.
At their best, FMs are a one-stop solution shop to many of our food
ills. They have local foods that have travelled very few miles. They
sustain bio-diversity. They retain food spending power within an
area. They are environmentally sustainable. They are mighty fun. This
combination of reasons explains why 10,000 people will turn up at the
People's Park in Dun Laoghaire on a fine Sunday for their local CoCo
market.
Yet, for some reason, FMs draw the ire of very many people, who
denounce both the FMs, and more especially the customers who use
them, as mere baubles for the bourgeoisie. As someone who has written
about FMs from the beginning - I wrote the first articles on major
markets such as Temple Bar and Midleton on the Weekend pages of this
very newspaper - and who uses markets on a weekly basis, I think the
critics are missing the plot.
People don't use markets because they are an opportunity to show off
their spending power. They use them, I would suggest, for health just
as much as pleasure, and they don't differentiate between these two
objectives.
Farmer's markets are not playgrounds for dilettantes. They are part
of a food counter-culture.
This counter culture has its author heroes, such as Michael Pollan,
Joanna Blythman, Felicity Lawrence or Peter Singer, the philosopher
who has defined the debate on animal rights.
When the writer Jonathan Harvey tells us, in his book "We Want Real
Food", that Western European countries are "fifty years into a mass
experiment in human nutrition. We're all eating basic foods that have
been stripped of the antioxidants, trace elements and minerals and
essential fatty acids that once promoted good health", then we
believe Mr Harvey. And we respond in a simple way: we go to the
market, to get organic foods, local foods, artisan foods, the foods
that we believe will maintain, if not improve, our health.
We don't believe the nutritionists who tell us everything is fine. We
don't trust mass-produced foods, the battery chicken-Corn Flakes-Coca-
Cola culture that assails us, and our children, every day of the
week. BSE and bird flu don't surprise us one bit when they happen,
because we know the commercialized food culture is always working on
the edge of disaster.
And we have our food heroes, the individuals whose produce we snap up
at whatever markets we attend. Dan Ahern for chickens. Jens Krumpe
for dry-aged beef. Fingal Ferguson for pork. Stephane Griesbach for
fish. Sheridan's for cheeses. Jane Russell for sausages. Willie
Scannell for spuds. David Llewellyn for apple juice. Gary Crocker for
eggs. The list could go on and on, and goes on for page after page of
the new Bridgestone Irish Food Guide, which has grown to 536 pages,
largely thank to the growth in markets and producers.
Whilst personal health is a paramount element, it is only one reason
why those 10,000 people are at the People's Park on a Sunday.
Environmental health and agricultural sustainability are other
reasons why we use markets: we want a fit, clean planet for our
children. Far from being dilettantes, shoppers at FMs are highly
conscientious.
They can see the big picture wherein a healthy planet with a healthy
agriculture sustains healthy people. When we read the findings of the
geologist and nutritionist David Thomas, quoted in Jonathan Harvey's
book, that "you'd have needed to eat ten tomatoes in 1991 to get the
amount of copper a single tomato would have supplied in 1940", then
we know that allowing intensive, chemicalised, monoculture
agriculture to dictate what we eat will not sustain us.
07 July 2007
Lord Bagenal Hotel
John writes: A little note from the road. A night with the family at James Kehoe's svelte new hotel at the venerable Lord Bagenal Inn in Leighlinbridge, County Carlow. A glam new building, brilliant rooms and in The Waterfront restaurant, a great space for George Kehoe to show his stuff. Mr Kehoe has worked with some of the best talents in contemporary Irish cuisine – Aidan Byrne, Paul Flynn, Derry Clarke – and it shows: the cooking in the LB is top-notch, and even manages to pull off those molecular cooking elements – foams, savoury ice creams – that so many chefs get all wrong. The food is simple to read – carpaccio of Hereford beef, horseradish ice cream, beetroot pickle; strip of veal with smoked Gubbeen and potato gratin, peas and bacon, bearnaise sauce – but the impact of the combinations, right from a little taster of air-dried lamb with lavender honey - is simply stunning. This is some of the hottest cooking going on right now, and simply should not be missed.
Waterfront Restaurant 059 9721668.
Waterfront Restaurant 059 9721668.
05 July 2007
Did We Miss Anyone?
A number of you have contacted us to say that, while you like the guide, we've missed out one of your favourite places. We love getting this sort of feedback (though we hate missing good places). If you think we've overlooked somewhere, please tell us about it...
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